I am sure that we would have no problem with getting a license, but to our knowledge they do not have an etext. This is true of many older works, printed before the days of easy electronic publishing. Really old PD works have often been etexted (and we owe a lot to those who did this as a labor of love), but on the whole works that are not in the Public Domain are not worth etexting as they cannot be freely distributed. Yes, we have and are etexting some materials, but this is a massive series and would be a huge and expensive undertaking.

Does etexting mean scanning in volumes? If so and a licence can be obtained, some of us who own TDOT can share in labour of love and scan in a volume or two.

Thanks for the offer, but it's not that simple. To get accurate scans the print volumes need to be unbound to get the pages flat. And, that's just the first (and easiest) step. OCR'ing the text into an editable format is what is most often difficult and labor intensive. Even the best software is not 100% accurate and requires proofing, especially with original languages, and especially with Hebrew. It's all possible to do, but as Helen mentioned, it is a big undertaking.

Today I emailed asking about the availability of the TDOT set and was told by Keith Lawrence that he knew of "nothing in the pipeline". He suggested that I add my request here, which I gladly now do.

For nearly two decades I had used BibleWorks, but needed more of the original language sources and tools, so consequently purchased Accordance. For my Biblical Hebrew research and writing Accordance seems to have most, if not all, of the major, respected works covered except for TDOT.

I understand and appreciate the cost in money and time of undertaking a fresh project of this size. I have a suggestion: if you got, say, 100 members willing to make an advance payment (or use account credit) towards TDOT of $100 each, that would give you $10,000 up front. Would that be enough to cover the project?

Unfortunately I would have thought $10,000 was nowhere near enough. I looked up the average salary in the US and got a figure of about $26,000. So taking into account no other costs that a company would have and assuming an average salary then $10,000 would be about 4.5 months of work for one person. That person would have to unbind, OCR, check the etext, then create an accordance tool for 15 volumes in that time. That is a volume in about 1.5 weeks. I can assure you just creating a user tool from an existing etext can take longer than that. So I think $10,000 needs to be multiplied significantly to get to anything like a true cost of producing this.

This is interesting. I understood that Eerdmans was the copyright holder and that TDOT was very much of a current project with volume 16 being completed sometime in 2014, and still not published in hardback format?

Today I emailed asking about the availability of the TDOT set and was told by Keith Lawrence that he knew of "nothing in the pipeline". He suggested that I add my request here, which I gladly now do.

For nearly two decades I had used BibleWorks, but needed more of the original language sources and tools, so consequently purchased Accordance. For my Biblical Hebrew research and writing Accordance seems to have most, if not all, of the major, respected works covered except for TDOT.

I understand and appreciate the cost in money and time of undertaking a fresh project of this size. I have a suggestion: if you got, say, 100 members willing to make an advance payment (or use account credit) towards TDOT of $100 each, that would give you $10,000 up front. Would that be enough to cover the project?

Well, an update for everyone! Here is a reply I just got from Eerdmans regarding getting an etext for TDOT:

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Dear Mr. Steffens II,

Thank you very much for your email and question. Unfortunately, we have been engaged with attempting to gain those rights from the original German publisher so that the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament can be made available in lots of electronic platforms. To date the German publisher has been unsuccessful in contacting and gaining those rights from the many parties who own rights in that work and so we are not able to license TDOT for electronic platforms.

I hope that one day this will happen, but so far it has been an exercise in patience.